


Hack-job

by PanicFOB



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-01-31 01:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21437596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanicFOB/pseuds/PanicFOB
Summary: Bucky Barnes struggles to find himself outside of the shadow of Steve Rogers. When a moment of insanity causes him to chop off all his hair, Bucky is forced by Sam to go see a professional hairdresser that will attempt to fix the hack-job. Bucky doesn’t expect to grow so fond of the woman styling his hair.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 21
Kudos: 138





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> No promises of regular updates on this series until after Christmas!

A reflection. By definition: a return of light after striking a surface. A counterpart. A duplicate. An impression. A reproduction. An echo.

A reflection. Another set of eyes, identical to his own, looking back at him in a way he didn’t fully understand. That steel-blue pair seemed to know something about him, that Bucky was unaware of himself.

A reflection. The first thing he had to see during his morning trip to the bathroom. Mangled dark hair hanging down. A disgusting scar wrapping around his left shoulder. An arm that would always be foreign to him.

A reflection. The image he hated more than any other. It showed him a man broken. A man confused. A man lost. A man left behind.

His reflection. So jarring to his sleepy brain. He would often lose half an hour staring at it, challenging the man on the other side of the reflective glass. It was merely the return of his own light striking the surface, but it somehow caused Bucky great pain every single day.

He would have to talk to Sam about getting all the mirrors removed from the apartment.

It was strange, he and Sam sharing an apartment and trying to go about their normal lives like nothing out of the ordinary had occurred over the past five years. In reality, Bucky’s life had been in a constant state of strange changes since the 1940s. He never had a moment to get used to the way things were, never a day to get settled before he was experiencing another great upheaval.

To be fair, this past month since he and Sam had rented this quaint little two-bedroom place might have been the most ordinary period of Bucky’s exceedingly long life. Sam had taken on the mantel of Captain America with grace and confidence. Bucky stood by his side, fighting as his right-hand man. Sam’s home had been sold during the five years that he and Bucky had been snapped out of existence. Bucky never had a home to begin with. And the compound had been destroyed by Thanos. This left the two men with a severe lack of options.

Bucky might have been reluctant to live with Sam Wilson pre-snap, considering the two of them hadn’t exactly gotten along. Now though, they were united by their grief. Everything good about their lives had seemed to disappear in the fight against Thanos: Tony, Natasha, and especially Steve. Bucky and Sam could find common ground in their despair for people lost, and work together to try to move forward as the new heroes of New York.

Except that Sam seemed to be moving at a faster pace than Bucky. His friend was more and more cheery every day, no longer somber under the weight of how the world had changed while they were gone. His new title as the Captain motivated him and gave him something to fight for that Bucky couldn’t seem to mimic in himself.

Sam also began going to visit Steve twice a week. He told Bucky that it brought him peace to hear all the tales of Steve’s happy life with Peggy. It didn’t seem to bother him so much anymore that their best friend had left the two of them behind.

When Sam informed him that Steve had said Bucky was welcome to visit anytime, Bucky had nearly thrown up in his mouth. The thought of sitting on some porch next to his decrepit friend as he bragged about all the wonderful years of his life that he had gotten back made Bucky so ill that he couldn’t stomach it.

He hadn’t seen Steve Rogers since the day he handed the shield over to Sam, and Bucky really didn’t plan to ever see him again. He had nothing to say to him.

They had no missions tonight, and Sam had gone out for a date. He’d found it pretty easy to get back out into the dating pool, meeting a different girl at the bar every other weekend. Bucky didn’t mind. He liked to be alone most of the time anyway.

Now, he stared at that daunting reflection in the bathroom once again. It seemed to say “I know who you are, but do you know who you are?” and that was the problem, wasn’t it: Bucky Barnes had no idea who he was. His entire existence had been tied up in the life of Steve Rogers. He’d rarely had any time to shine as only himself. He was Steve’s big-brother figure, then his comrade in the war, then his deceased loved one, then his enemy, then his recovering friend, and then his deceased loved one all over again.

No matter how intensely he studied the angles of his jaw in the mirror, or the hard definition of his abdomen, the frown lines of his forehead, the downward curve of his lips, Bucky could not pinpoint the key components that formed an identity. He had no idea who he was.

It angered him beyond belief. Surely, it must have been insane to feel furious and baffled by one’s own reflection.

One day.

Just one day, Bucky would love to walk into the bathroom, flick on the light and immediately recognized who he was seeing in the damned mirror.

That day never seemed to come though.

He began pulling drawers open, shuffling through random objects that Sam liked to keep in their shared bathroom for some reason. It wasn’t until he got to the fourth drawer that he came across a pair of scissors.

He studied them with awe, like a prize he had won.

Bucky turned out the lights.

In complete darkness, he opened the scissors and began hacking away at the curtain of hair around his face.

Blindly, he snipped the locks off. At first a tiny bit, and then he started cutting nearly to his scalp in some places. He could feel the hair falling across his bare feet. It tickled his toes. His head grew lighter and lighter as the weight of his hair left him. Once nearly all of it was gone, Bucky steeled himself and flicked the light back on.

It hadn’t worked.

Bucky didn’t recognize this man either.

He scowled at his reflection before turning the light back off and going to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

Had it always been there?

Had this crushing longing in Bucky’s cold heart been there as long as his metal arm? Had the longing preceded the arm, preceded the serum? Had it rooted itself in childhood? A boy’s life so centered around one individual, so determined to save a tiny blonde from himself. Had a feeling of friendship always been something a little more than that to James Buchanan Barnes, but never anything more than that to Steven Grant Rogers?

When had it started? And had this aching decay of his yearning heart ruined him forever? Would Bucky ever get passed this? Because really, there wasn’t possibly a worse time to realize he loved his best friend, was in love with his best friend, than after he’d traveled back in time to spend his days with his best girl Peggy Carter.

Not only had Bucky’s identity been intertwined with Steve’s, his heart had been latched onto the man as well. He felt a need to reject everything that reminded him of his friend while simultaneously needing to cling to everything that spoke to the times they had spent together.

He’d cut his hair in an attempt to recognize himself, but it was also an effort to chop away the moments Steve had spent saving Bucky from himself when he was being influenced as the Winter Soldier. It was an eraser of the times that Steve stopped by Wakanda just to see how Bucky’s recovery was going. It was their last hug before Steve stepped onto that platform being purposefully forgotten.

Instead of freeing himself from these torturous thoughts, Bucky’s hacked away hair only brought him new ones. Or rather, older ones. Short hair brought vintage stills of a Steve in a smaller stature, Bucky cleaning the blood from his nose and holding ice to his black eye. It reminded Bucky how everything had changed about Steve when he took the serum, everything except for Steve’s heart. His morality and sense of duty remained true no matter what. It filled his brain with the way Steve looked in a uniform. Not his Captain America suit, but the regular army uniform that everyone wore. Helmets and mud. Trenches and boots. The blue of his eyes brighter than all the bleakness of the war front.

How had Bucky not seen it before? How there was no difference between the way he looked at all the women he had taken out dancing and the way he looked at Steve. Those feelings of delight and captivation were alike. But Steve was larger than life, grander than this entire country. Bucky couldn’t see his own feelings through the blinding light that was Captain America.

What was there left to do? Come to terms with it? Rediscover himself? God forbid he do the one thing that Sam was sure to suggest if he confessed his feelings for Steve to the man. His roommate would insist that Bucky go talk to wrinkly old Steve, get some closure. There was no way in hell he was telling that saggy bastard that he had loved him all his life.

If there was one thing Bucky had realized in the same instant that he suddenly understood his love for Steve, it was that Steve had never looked at him the same way. Steve loved Peggy. Chose Peggy. Steve lived a happy life with her. As much as Bucky loathed Steve in that moment when he hadn’t returned, he also didn’t want to burden Steve with the weight of knowing how Bucky felt.

Sunlight was creeping in through his dark curtains now. In bed, Bucky reached a flesh hand up to run across his uneven hair. Longer clumps separated by short prickly patches. He had really done a number on himself last night.

Back to the bathroom mirror he went. Shoulders tense as he braced himself for the jarring image. His reflection was somehow kinder today, but still unfamiliar. It was as if it knew that Bucky was having a rough time and had decided to go easy on him for one morning. He performed his usual morning routines. A piss, a quick shower, a brush of his teeth. Then he was alone again, away from the watchful steel-blue eyes of that mirror.

Except he wasn’t really alone because when he entered the kitchen to make some plain toast, Sam was already awake and munching on a bowl of Apple Jacks.

“Jesus, fuck. What the hell happened to you, Bucky?”

Bucky shrugged. “Gave myself a haircut.”

“Clearly. You look awful. Is everything okay with you? This isn’t exactly healthy behavior, man.”

“I’m fine, Sam. Just had an overdramatic moment last night and took it out on my hair.”

“Well,” Sam paused for a moment to chew another mouthful of cereal, “I’m always here if you need to talk about anything. I know we haven’t been the best of friends forever, but we’re teammates now, and we should support each other. Whatever you need, man. I got you.”

“Right. Thanks Sam.”

“Have you thought anymore about going to visit Steve?”

Bucky accidentally slammed the cabinet a little too hard. “I’ve thought about how much I don’t want to do that.”

“He misses you.”

“So?”

“He’s still your best friend.”

“Sure,” Bucky said to be agreeable, but inside, he was wondering how long it had been since Steve had really been his best friend. Bucky had been dust, and Steve had probably mourned him for a long time, but then he found a new best friend in Natasha. And now, seventy years separated their friendship. Steve didn’t even know him anymore. Not that Bucky knew himself, but that was beside the point.

“You’ll need to get into a salon to get your head looking a little less… insane. I know a girl. Let me just find her number in my phone.” Sam scrolled through his smartphone and then grabbed a pen and sticky pad from the mail bin next to the fridge. He scribbled something onto the page and then handed it to Bucky.

It was a name. Y/N.

Below it, ten digits.

“She’s an old friend from high school and the best hairdresser I know. If she can’t fix that hack-job, then nobody can. Give her a call.”


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky hated overly-scented shampoos.

There was a time, way back in the twentieth century, when soap was used only for cleaning, not for perfuming, and Bucky missed those days dearly. When Steve would sit close to him on the couch of their apartment in Brooklyn, Bucky would inhale deeply and linger in the absence of flowery smells. Steve wouldn’t smell like lavender or lemongrass or peppermint. He’d simply smell like Steve, and Bucky would never have wanted it any other way.

During his time in the war, the men were lucky to get their hands on bars of soap every few days. The stench in the trenches was unimaginable, and still, Bucky couldn’t find himself wishing for overpowering sweet scents as he scrubbed his hair. He didn’t want to smell bad, he didn’t want to smell amazing, he simply wanted to smell like nothing at all.

As a covert assassin, it was important not to give away his hidden position with the strong scent of shampoo.

In Wakanda, he specifically asked for unscented soaps, the people of the palace were happy to oblige.

But when he hugged Steve moments before they went into battle with Thanos’ army, the horrific smell of an artificial ocean breeze overtook him. Bucky felt, at that moment, that he had lost something. Steve no longer smelled like Steve. He smelled like modern shampoo designed to cover up all one’s labors of the day. There was no odorous proof of his toil, no scented evidence of his fight. Steve would be a fake ocean breeze forevermore in Bucky’s brain. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t procure the memory of Steve’s pleasant scent when it wasn’t being covered up by that shampoo.

“Would you like a wash before I begin cutting?” the woman, Y/N, asked him with a polite smile.

“No thank you. I just washed it at home before coming,” he answered her in his practiced kind voice. Sometimes, it was a great effort not to sound menacing.

“Oh, right. I figured since it was still damp, but some people just really enjoy the feeling of having their hair washed at the salon.”

He shook his head. “I’ll pass.”

She caught his eye in the mirror he was sitting in front of, and Bucky wondered why her smile suddenly turned reassuring. Did she think he was scared of a simple haircut?

“Okay, I understand.” She began combing the longer pieces of his hair. “The uneven nature doesn’t leave us with too many options until it grows back out some, but I was thinking we could buzz it really short on the sides and leave the top a tiny bit longer. Does that sound okay?”  
“That’s fine,” Bucky said noncommittally.

“Are you sure? I can show you a picture of what it will look like.”

“That won’t be necessary. My hair isn’t really a big deal for me anymore. Do whatever you want with it.”

Another tight-lipped, polite smile. “It’s not often my customers tell me to do whatever with their heads.”

“I honestly would have left it like this if Sam hadn’t insisted,” Bucky informed her.

She eyed him in the mirror for a moment longer before she took the trimmer to the sides of his hair. “How is Sam? I hadn’t really heard from him much in the last five or six years.”

“Doing great. He fits the position of Captain America pretty perfectly. If Steve hadn’t done it so well before him, I would have thought the job was made specifically for Sam.”

“That’s good… really good. He was always such a noble and honest man during school. It’s why we became such close friends, and why he chose to join the military of course.”

“Not all men join the armed forces out of the goodness of their hearts, ma’am.”

“That’s not why you joined, Sergeant?”

“Not really…”

“Why then?”

“Steve. The little bastard told me that since he wanted to fight so bad but couldn’t, it was an insult to him for me not to fight if I could.”

“That seems a little selfish of your friend.”

“Steve was brave and truthful and kind, but he certainly had his moments where he got so caught up in his own problems that he couldn’t see anything else.”

“But you did it anyway? Let him guilt you into going to war even though you knew he was being selfish.”

“I would have followed any order Steve gave me, no matter how ridiculous. He was my Captain… even then.”

“That sounds…” but she trailed off as she grabbed her shiny scissors from a supply drawer. He waited to see if she would finish her sentence, but the ending never came.

“That sounds what?”

Y/N’s eyes flicked back to his in the mirror. “I probably shouldn’t say.”

“Afraid you’ll offend me?” Bucky was challenging her now. He wanted to show someone, anyone, even this complete stranger that he wasn’t a frail little ling. He was strong, unflinching, fearless. He could take the harsh truth. He could survive the pain of Steve leaving him. He could survive whatever this woman was about to say to him now.

“I just think it sounds rather romantic, that you’d follow him anywhere like that.”

Bucky closed his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting that. Hadn’t been expecting for it to be so obvious, for his emotions to be so plain across his hallowed face. This woman had already figured out the core piece of Bucky Barnes’ identity, or at least, his old identity. Because the old Bucky was nothing more than a man at Steve Rogers’ side.

“Or maybe I’m completely off base. Maybe you’re simply the most loyal best friend in the world.”

He continued to say nothing, opening his eyes but keeping them focused on his hands clasped together in his lap, avoiding the curious gaze coming through the mirror.

Because he wasn’t paying attention to whatever she was doing, he didn’t have the awareness to stop her before she’d put some sort of scented moose in his hair after she’d finished cutting it.

“No, don’t!” he said, but it was already too late.

Her hands stilled, but they were still in his hair and still covered in an overpowering faux masculine scent. “I’m so sorry. I had figured you’d want it styled.”

He stood from the chair abruptly and pulled a nice amount of cash out of his wallet. Handing it over to her, he said, “Thanks for the cut. I need to get going.”

She took the money slowly and looked at him with wide eyes.

Bucky left the salon cursing the smelly goop in his hair. It would probably take three days before he’d stop catching whiffs of it. Not only was his reflection foreign to him, but now he couldn’t even recognize his own scent.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this is another angsty chapter, but I promise that by the end of it, Bucky will be feeling more hopeful. It’s a slow progression, but Bucky is healing from a very bad heartbreak, and that takes a lot of time!

March 10th. Today was his birthday.

Bucky didn’t even know how old he was. Add that to the expanding list of things he didn’t know about himself.

When a life had spanned across time with all sorts of freezes and blips in the middle, it was hard to determine which years of that life should count toward the whole. Obviously, his childhood should be included. He remembered it clearly, how fiercely he lived in the streets of Brooklyn, how determined he was to feel that spice of life right beside Steve before World War II put a damper on everything. That made twenty-six years that Bucky could accept as real.

Should his time in the 107th and the Howling Commandos count? During those days, he’d sometimes wished his life would end just to get out of the dreariness of the frontline. But the simple fact of wishing his life away confirmed for him that he was still very much alive during that time. Those years should count as well, two more to add to this running total. That makes twenty-eight.

He refused to include the next sixty-nine years of darkness. At no point as the Winter Soldier did Bucky ever feel like he was living. He never held consciousness long enough to even wish himself dead. He was a puppet, a tool. He was asleep in cryo most of the time when he wasn’t committing heinous crimes that no part of his being wanted to partake in. For nearly seven decades, Bucky Barnes was dead, and only a mere shell of him walked the earth. Those years could not count.

So, when he started to regain his senses in 2014, Bucky began the age count at twenty-eight. For two more years, he played the part of a ghost, but he was no longer Hydra’s lifeless assassin. In hiding, he still ate and thought and read and wrote. He still worked tirelessly to piece together the puzzle that was his own jumbled brain. He still thought of Steve in very confusing ways. To Bucky, those years counted. When Steve found him in Bucharest, he was at the milestone age of thirty.

He remembered thinking how much older his friend suddenly seemed. While Bucky had been so focused on getting his own senses back, Steve had lived through some difficult and aging years. Bucky quickly ran a separate aging timeline in his head for Steve and determined that on that day in Romania, his friend would no longer have been a year younger than him, but instead, a year older than him at thirty-one.

Only, Steve didn’t seem thirty-one; he seemed like he’d lived a lifetime already, even if that lifetime had been mostly frozen. He was weary, worn out from struggling all this time without his best friend at his side. For the first time since before Steve had met Peggy, Bucky had felt a glimmer of hope that he might be the most important person in the man’s life. He basked in the feeling of being the center of Steve Rogers’ universe once more, and despite how selfish he knew it was, Bucky was thankful that Peggy hadn’t gotten a new life in the 21st century like he and Steve had.

Bucky thought about adding his time in Wakanda as part of his determined age. Despite going back into cryo, it wasn’t long enough for Bucky to have missed much, and he still felt productive toward his mental state when he made that choice. It was his frozen nature that allowed Shuri to heal him. It was then that Bucky got his ability to live more vibrantly than ever. When he awoke and was given a hut to inhabit near the river, it all felt like a perfect slice of living paradise that he hadn’t even had the capabilities to dream about beforehand.

One would think, with his mind working so clearly once more, he might have realized the true nature of his feelings for Steve at this point. But it still never dawned on him. Maybe it was that Steve only came by once a month and only for short visits. Maybe it was that Bucky was so distracted by the beauty of the country that had taken him in and given him a home. For the first time in Bucky’s life, Steve was not the center of his universe.

Of course these glorious years in Wakanda would count. And they counted for Steve as well, his time spent traveling the globe with Natasha, Wanda, and Sam. Each time he would visit Bucky’s hut, he always spun some grand tale of adventure that the four of them had gotten up to. Bucky could always tell from the brilliant blue of his eyes that Steve was truly living.

And when Steve returned to Wakanda in 2018 with heavy shoulders and a comforting hug for Bucky before the frightening news of the war that they faced, Bucky realized it was the last moment that he and Steve had ever been close in age. It was the last time that Bucky’s realization and confession of love might have ever meant anything real to Steve. Because after the blip, Bucky was still thirty-two, but Steve was thirty-eight.

Five years might not seem so significant, but there were five years for Steve Rogers to finally get used to the idea of living without Bucky Barnes. Five years for him to age and grow and change. For him to become someone that was too mature and different for Bucky to feel close to any longer. Of all the many decades that warped his and Steve’s sense of time and age, nothing fucked things up more than those five years in which Steve existed and Bucky did not.

He supposed there had been something he could actually come to know about himself. Bucky had worked it out: he would be celebrating his 33rd birthday today. Well, if it were up to him, he would be spending it in bed, but Sam had insisted on a quick trip back to Wakanda where the Guardians would be visiting as well.

“Happy Birthday, old man!” Sam shouted at him as he stumbled into what was the living area of the suite of rooms they’d been given at T’Challa’s palace.

Bucky closed his eyes heavily with a cringe. He wasn’t hungover or anything, (In fact, he couldn’t get hungover.) but the idea of a birthday and all this confusing age nonsense had given him a piercing headache just behind his eyes. “Okay, let’s not do the shouting.”

“Fine, fine… But you and I need to have a talk.”

Bucky sat down on the other end of the couch and let out an irritated groan. “What have I done this time?”

“I got a text from my friend Y/N. You know, the lady who cut your hair?”

Bucky sat up a little straighter and swallowed nervously. He could only imagine the unpleasant things she’d had to say about him after his terrible display of manners. “And?”

“She wanted to know if you were doing okay… said you seemed pretty upset and a bit out of it at the salon. She said you were kind of rude to her, but she was afraid it was something she had said to upset you, and she wanted to apologize for that.”

“Oh…” Bucky mumbled. Sam would probably be angry with him for six months for not treating his oldest friend with more respect.

“You wanna tell me what all that was about?”

He glanced around, trying to find anything else to focus on so that he didn’t have to look Sam in the eye. And what was Bucky meant to say? That he’d grown displeased because the woman had easily seen how in love he was with Steve by the few simple sentences he had uttered about the man? There’s no way he was confessing that to Sam. And he certainly couldn’t mention the whole scented mousse in his hair thing. Sam would definitely think he was insane.

“I was just having a bad day, and then she made a comment that brought up some hard memories, and I handled it poorly. I’m sorry, Sam.”

“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to. When we get back to New York, you need to go and see her and make things right.”

“I will. I promise.”

At Bucky’s birthday dinner that night, as every member of the royal family and all the living members of the Guardians wished him a happy 106th, he didn’t feel the need to correct them. He blew out all one hundred and six candles without complaint, but in his head, he was debating how he wanted to live out this 33rd year.

Of each of those years that Bucky had determined were actually lived by him, only a select few were great all year long. 2017 was the first to come to mind. But some of the years before the war back in Brooklyn were memorably grand as well. He couldn’t say what exactly would need to happen in this new year of his life for it to be spectacular, but he suddenly had a new resolve to make it that way.

As everyone tucked into a three-tiered carrot cake, he decided the best place to start was to make things right with Y/N. If she had always been a good friend to Sam, then she would surely be a good friend to Bucky too. And Bucky was suffering from a shortage of close friends these days.

He played out an imaginary conversation, practicing over and over again in his head what he would say to her to convince her that he was more than just a grumpy bastard. Hopefully, by the time they made it back home, he’ll have landed on the right words.


	5. Chapter 5

Smile with his eyes. Make sure the crinkles are there. Make sure his teeth are showing. But only a little bit. Not in, like, a creepy way.

Change the inflections in his voice. Don’t sound monotone or it won’t seem genuine.

Make eye contact. Don’t stare at his shoes or fidget with his hands. Don’t run them nervously through his hair.

And for the love of god, don’t fall into that effortless resting murder face that Sam insisted he did at nearly all hours of the day.

Sometimes, Bucky felt like a robot trying to learn normal human interactions. Or an alien in a human suit trying to blend in with the inhabitants of earth. He thought back to the smooth guy he used to be before the war, how each word and every smile came naturally, and all the people in Brooklyn knew his name and adored him. Where was that guy today?

Now, he had to practice an apology in front of the blasted bathroom mirror a hundred times before he felt confident enough to perform it in person.

Sam appeared at the open doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Just lighten up, Bucky. If you’d stop thinking about how you want to murder everybody, then you’d stop looking like you want to murder everybody.”

Bucky turned away from the mirror and toward his friend, schooling his features into the most intense murder face he could muster. “I don’t want to murder everybody. Only one person comes to mind at the moment.”

“Steve?” Sam asked, pretending to be oblivious.

“Make that two,” Bucky countered before bumping Sam’s shoulder as he marched past him out the bathroom doorway.

The salon was a bustle of chattering women this time. At his appointment before, Y/N had been the only person here. He supposed it must be their rush hour. Standing at the front counter was a tall woman with ringlets of auburn hair. She looked him up and down before asking if he had an appointment.

“Uh, no I don’t. I’m just here to see Y/N.”

“Well, handsome, I hate to say it, but everyone in the salon has their hands full for the rest of the day. So, if you don’t have an appointment, we’re not going to be able to get you in today.”

Bucky subconsciously raised his metal hand to his head and ran the fingers across his scalp. “I’m not here for a cut. I only need to speak with her for a moment.”

“You can’t just call her when she’s not working?” the redheaded woman asked in a disapproving voice.

“It’s really something that I needed to say in person.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What’s up with your hand there?”

He pulled it down from his head quickly and tucked it out of sight in the pocket of his jacket. “It’s a prosthetic. I lost my arm in active duty.”

And her eyes went from that narrowed suspicious look back to the appreciative studying that she’d been doing when Bucky first walked in. “A soldier, huh? I’ve never seen a prosthetic like that one before.”

“It’s high tech.”

“You must have friends in high places, Mr….?”

“Bucky Barnes,” he informed her as he presented his right hand for her to shake. “And I do indeed have friends in high places.”

“Bucky? What are you doing here? Do you not like your cut?” He leaned around the woman at the front desk to see Y/N standing there and looking quite worried.

He carefully forced a bright smile onto his face. “No, I love it. But I was hoping I could talk to you for just a moment…. In private?”

Her eyes clouded with confusion for a second, and then she glanced at the redhead, most likely hoping she had an explanation for this. All the woman could do was suggest, “Weren’t you about to take your lunch break anyway, Y/N?”

“Oh, right. I suppose I was.” Her head turned back to Bucky. “Would you want to walk with me down to the sandwich shop on the corner? We can talk on the way.”

He nodded his head eagerly. “That sounds perfect.”

March was still quite chilly in New York, nothing like the blistering heat that he’d experienced in Wakanda last week at his birthday party. He much preferred warmth over wintery winds though. The slightest bit of cold seemed to chill him to the bone, and as the frostiness seeped in, Bucky could never focus on anything other than Russia.

“So, what was it you wanted to speak with me about?” Y/N had pulled an oversized hoodie over her nice salon clothes before exiting the place with him and falling into a leisurely pace on the sidewalk.

“I wanted to apologize for the way I acted the last time we met.” He played the sentence back in his head after saying it aloud and hoped that it sounded sincere.

“You don’t have to do that. It was fine, really.”

“No, no. I was an asshole, and I’m sorry. My head’s been in a terrible place lately, but that’s no excuse for reacting so rudely to you. You’re Sam’s good friend, and I would hope that would mean that you and I could be good friends someday as well. Could we possibly forget that horrible first impression I made?” He’d been trying to meet her eye as he spoke, but she’d been watching her steps across the pavement instead.

Now, she glanced up at him, and Bucky remembered that feeling that had unsettled him the last time they met. When she looked into his eyes, he felt as if she knew exactly who he was. But that was impossible because Bucky didn’t even know who he was. How could this woman be privy to information about himself that he wasn’t? He desperately wanted to ask her.

“What sort of terrible place has your head been in?”

“You don’t really want me unloading eight decades worth of problems on you, do you?” he wondered with a lift of his brow.

“I don’t mind. You clearly want to talk to someone about it, but I get the feeling that you don’t want to open up to Sam. I’d be happy to listen.”

They arrived at the sandwich shop, and after they had both ordered, Bucky insisted on buying her lunch as another gesture of apology. At a wobbly table, she dug into her Italian sub while Bucky picked at his turkey and bacon and tried to formulate his convoluted thoughts into a level of organization that would allow him to speak.

“It’s all Steve’s fault,” he finally said, “but I think you had already guessed as much.”

“I had, yeah. Talking about him seemed to be what upset you the most that day.”

The next part was harder. Possibly the most difficult thing Bucky had ever done. Because these words, the ones that he was about to say to this woman he hardly knew, had never been spoken out loud to anyone. He hadn’t even whispered them aloud while alone in his room. Until this point, the realization had only been a thought rather than a statement.

“I loved him… Or, I still do, I suppose.”

She didn’t look the least bit surprised. She was still happily chewing her sandwich, and Bucky thought it was a tiny bit cute, the way her lips formed the words, “When did you know?” around a mouthful of food.

“Far too late for it to matter,” he informed her glumly.

“You think it would have mattered at one point? That he might have been in love with you as well?”

“Probably not. But maybe he could have started to love me if I had just told him how I felt before the snap… but I didn’t even know it myself back then.”

“And then it was too late?”

“And then it was too late.”

“Isn’t Steve Rogers still around in some retirement home somewhere? Couldn’t you still talk to him?”

Bucky grimaced, the same way he always did when he thought about Steve as a very old man.

“He is. Not in a retirement home, but in his own house, the one he shared with Peggy. And what would I possibly say? For him, it’s been a very very long time since we were best pals.”

“You could tell him that you miss him. That you’re angry with him for leaving you. You don’t necessarily have to confess your love.”

“And if I don’t, then I’m still in the same exact place: pining after a Steve Rogers that doesn’t even exist anymore, and him being utterly clueless.”

Y/N glanced at her watch. “Shit. Bucky I’m really sorry, but I have to get back to work. But I really want to continue this conversation with you. You still have my number, right? Give me a call this evening.” She stood from the table and was about to walk off before she turned back to him and said, “Apology accepted, by the way. So don’t go stressing yourself out over that anymore.”

He smiled at her again, and this time, it didn’t feel so robotic and alien.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regular weekly updates now that Christmas is over! I promise!

Routine was a funny thing. Sometimes a torturous state, a burdensome monotony of never-ending sameness. Other times, a familiar tranquility, a comforting bubble of everything contentedly expected.

Humans were funny creatures. How they somehow craved both the relaxing embrace of routine and the thrilling escape from it all at the same time. How they wanted nothing more than to live the simple life with easily defined jobs and goals and hobbies, but as soon as such an ordinary life was achieved, a burning for complexity erupted in their souls. And as soon as chaos painted each of their days, they hoped and prayed for a taste of that boring routine once more. 

Bucky felt this strange conflict now. He would thrive in the practiced motions of missions with Sam. Taking great comfort in the perfect feel of a knife in his hand, Sam swooping around above him and taking out any of the targets that Bucky hadn’t gotten to yet. He also flourished under the now routine lunches with Y/N at the sandwich shop. Every day he met her there, and every day, she got him to open up a little bit more about himself and the things that had been constantly clouding his thoughts. It was so eerie how easily she ripped at his seems and how willingly he would unfold for her. And once every few weeks, he’d follow her back to the salon and sit down for a new cut. His hair had finally evened out, and maybe it was the sameness of the hair on his head that had Bucky simultaneously in desperate need of change.

He longed for the unexpected, uncontrollable thing that would surely only spell disaster. But he felt that if he never moved toward anything unique or out of the ordinary, he’d forever go on being the guy that was left by Steve.

Sam was already convinced that Bucky and Y/N were dating, but it wasn’t like that. At least, not at the moment. She was simply a friend, a wonderful confidant who was far too generous in her patience when it came to listening to Bucky drone on about Steve.

During one particular mouthful of pastrami sandwich, a chaotic idea illuminated in Bucky’s mind, and he didn’t even blink before speaking the thought.

“Do you get any vacation days from work?” he asked Y/N, only realizing after he’d spit tiny bits of pastrami on the table that he should have minded his table manners a bit better.

“Well, I own the place, so as long as I have a capable manager to watch over things, I can take off whenever I’d like.”

“Wait, you own the place? How did I not know this?” Bucky was surprised to say the least. He quickly ran back through all the previous conversations they had had, trying to recall a time when she had mentioned anything about being the owner.

“Probably because we don’t talk about me all that much,” she pointed out, and now Bucky felt terrible. She’d wanted to be his friend, but instead, he’d treated her like an unpaid therapist, never bothering to ask her much about herself in between all his depressing venting.

“Shit, you’re right. I’m an asshole.”

“No, Bucky, it’s fine. I invited you to talk about all your troubles because you don’t have anyone else you can share them with. It wasn’t a complaint, it was simply an explanation for why you wouldn’t know that I own the salon.”

He nodded in understanding but silently vowed to learn as much about her as he possibly could.

“Would you want to take some vacation time soon then?”

She raised an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”

“A road trip.”

“A road trip? To where?”

“California and back.”

She let out an incredulous laugh. “You’re proposing a cross-country road trip?”

He shrugged but nodded. “I need to get away from New York for a while, and I don’t mean to Wakanda or some other place that’s just swarming with superheroes. I want to go to a thousand different places in my own country that I’ve never seen or even heard of. I want to feel a little lost for a while, drive until I reach the Pacific Ocean.”

“And you want me to go with you?”

“It’s not a road trip if you go alone.”

“Oh really? What is it then?”

“Just sad.”

She was silent for a moment, clearly thinking up more dilemmas with Bucky’s masterplan.

“Don’t you have some like important world-saving you have to do on most days? Are you sure you can get away from that for that long?”

“There are plenty of others to jump in and fill my spot until I’m back. If Steve can leave for a lifetime, then I’m allowed to leave for a week or two.”

She still looked very uncertain.

“I’ll sweeten the deal,” he said to push her the rest of the way. “We can take a car instead of my bike. I suppose I can tolerate a roof over our heads on the freeway.”

“I hadn’t even realized you’d been considering your bike, but my answer would have been a definite no if I had known.”

He ignored her smart remark and continued. “I promise not to say a single word about Steve while we’re gone.”

“Bucky, I don’t want you to promise that. It’s good to talk about these things.”

“I know, but if we go on this trip together, I want it to be about me and you. Us learning about ourselves, learning about each other, and solidifying our friendship amidst the chaos. Wha’d’ya say?”

“I say you’re a little crazy,” she answered with a grin.

He returned it. “Oh, a hundred percent, certifiably. My brain’s more jumbled than a pan of scrambled eggs.”

She burst into laughter, head tilting back a bit, mouth open to the ceiling. Bucky let it go on, happily soaking in the joyful sound. Only when her eyes returned to his and the large laugh had fallen back to a fond smile did Bucky speak again. “Will you go with me?”

“I’ll go with you, Bucky,” she agreed, and both comfort and chaos danced in her eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

The fact that Sam had allowed them to take his car, despite what Bucky had done to the man’s last car the first time they met, was an absolute miracle. It was a nice and roomy SUV with Bluetooth for Y/N to connect her phone and play one of the dozens of Road Trip playlists she’d made in the days leading up to the trip. In the center cup holders were two cans of Red Bull that Bucky had grabbed from a convenience store early this morning and Y/N had immediately nagged him about the dangers of drinking those sorts of things. After listening to the half-hour lecture as he stared at the dark freeway ahead of him, he simply reminded her that super-soldiers didn’t have to follow the same health rules as normal people. She huffed and crossed her arms. He smirked.

Bucky lifted his left hand from the steering wheel, still holding it steady with his right, and ran his cool vibranium fingers through his short hair. It was a new habit he’d picked up, a sort of reminder of one of the strangest and most desperate things he’d done recently. A reminder that if he hadn’t done something drastic like hacking at his hair with shitty scissors, he would have never met the wonderful woman currently sitting in the passenger seat at an odd angle with her sneakers kicked up on the dashboard. They’d just come into Ohio in the last hour, and she’d startled excitedly, rolling down the window and pointing her finger enthusiastically at the sign that welcomed them into the new state. Bucky had never known there could be anything so exciting about fucking Ohio, but apparently, there was.

That was something she’d already started to show him on this trip: every part of this world was a bit exciting in its own way. It didn’t matter which small town they drove through or which lonely winding roads they followed, she kept her eyes alert, ears perked, and finger ready to point out something amazing. “Bucky look! Did you see it?!” she’d ask loudly, eyes wide with wonder, and Bucky couldn’t help feeling like he’d never really seen beauty before this because it was the way she pointed things out that made them suddenly have an immense appeal.

They decided to make their first overnight stop in a town called Lorain. It was right on the cusp of Lake Erie. An evening was spent at the edge of the water, sipping iced tea and munching on sandwiches. Bucky was nearly convinced that this woman knew no other food groups.

Sailboats skimmed across the deep blue waters with their tinges of algae green. Puffy white clouds blocked the setting sun intermittently. Y/N was sitting on Bucky’s west side, so each time he glanced at her, he’d get a different picturesque view. Sometimes, it was her bright smile, easy to see in the shade that the large clouds provided, but other times, Bucky could see nothing but the bright illumination of the sun behind her.

“Have you ever been in love?” he decided to ask her. It was part of his mission to know every little thing about her that he could.

“Possibly?”

“You don’t know?”

“Did you always know how you felt about Steve?” she countered, and Bucky could only tilt his head in acknowledgment because she had a good point. People so often described love as something that was unmissable. How could anyone ever be in love without knowing it? But it seemed more like the way you gain or lose weight without realizing, the way you age so slowly over time that you never see it happen. The way you grow taller each day and then shorter each day as your bones shrink once more. If Bucky had to describe what love was like, he’d say it was something that was with you every day, but you couldn’t see it for it’s constant proximity, and only when you’re forced to stand apart and view it from a new perspective does the immense emotion dawn on you.

“Okay, we’re not supposed to be talking about Steve, but if we were, I’d say that you’re right about me not always knowing, but I know now that it is, in fact, love. Surely, if there was love in your past, you would have figured it out by now.”

“Maybe I’m afraid to call it love because it had a less than pleasant ending, and I want to believe that if it was love, it would have been good and pure and golden.”

“You can’t always wait until the end to determine if the story was good or not. Sometimes, you have to make a judgment in the midst of things.”

Her eyes studied him with admiration. “Wise words, Bucky Barnes. I’ll keep them in mind.”

As the water continued to lap at their feet and the bottoms of their jeans they had rolled up past their ankles, Bucky asked her about less serious things, like her favorite color and favorite movie and her siblings and parents and her life in general between the time she’d met Sam in school and the time she’d met Bucky in the salon.

They rented a couple of hotel rooms close to the pier, but instead of slinking off to his separate bed and lying awake in the quiet darkness, Bucky joined Y/N in her room for some late-night TV. They watched celebrity guests on talk shows and made fun of the silly things they would say, the games they would play, or the way they would dress.

Only when the softest sound of her snoring filled his ears did Bucky finally stand from her bed and make his way out of her room and into his. He pulled off his t-shirt and sweatpants, slipping his boxer-brief-clad thighs under the sheets and letting his short hair rest against the uncomfortable hotel pillow. Without even noticing, Bucky’s mind slipped into unconsciousness without even flitting to the thought of Steve a single time.


End file.
